Esc.

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I just accidentally, somehow published this post while trying to type the title. That's how out of it I am after a full day on less than two hours of sleep. All because last night took me way longer to post than I anticipated and then forgetting that I had started working on the psot before I loaded the dishwasher, I allowed myself a relaxing game or two until I got sleepy. Then as I was preparing to lay down I remembered the full sink and half full dishwasher which my sister was counting on having run before breakfast which was now less than three hours off for her and Mom. When I got into the kitchen I also spotted the onion I had promised to chop for the next day's salad. So it was over an hour later before I was back in the bedroom and I was wide awake again. So I read for a bit then played another game and another. And suddenly realized there was light behind the curtains.

So when I realized it was seven-thirty and I was still going like an energizer bunny, I decided I might as well stay up all day. Ha. That lasted about an hour. About eight-thirty I had to lay down or I would have fallen over. But I set my alarm for ninety minutes later. I figured I'd hit the snooze a few times but I didn't. I got up and ended up staying up.

And managed to stay awake and competent all day. And without the help of coffee too. I had run out of my instant coffee crystals yesterday and subbed green tea.

Well enough blathering about it. Esc. here I come.

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Book Blurb: Lethal Legacy

This book was just delivered to me at my Mom's house today and will be the next novel I pick up after I finish Harriette Simpson Arnow's The Weedkiller's Daughter.

Read the rest of the story of the book's adventures on its way to me below.

And be sure to watch the video of Linda Fairstein touring the rooms of the New York Public Library--the setting of this novel. Awesome.

Lethal Legacy (Alexandra Cooper Novel)
by Linda Fairstein
(c) 2009
Pub. Doubleday
384p

genre: suspense/thriller; mystery; detective

In Linda Fairstein’s outstanding new novel, the New York Public Library houses dazzling treasures—and deadly secrets.

When Assistant District Attorney Alex Cooper is summoned to Tina Barr’s apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, she finds a neighbor convinced that the young woman was assaulted. But the terrified victim, a conservator of rare books and maps, refuses to cooperate with investigators. Then another woman is found murdered in that same apartment with an extremely valuable book, believed to have been stolen. As Alex pursues the murderer, she is drawn into the strange and privileged world of the Hunt family, major benefactors of the New York Public Library and passionate rare book collectors.

Eventually Alex connects their internal family rivalries to a priceless edition of Alice in Wonderland, which also contains the world’s oldest map. Would one of the well-bred Hunts be willing to kill for the treasures? The search for the answer takes Alex and her team on a breathtaking chase from Manhattan’s grandest apartments to the secret tunnels and chambers of the New York Public Library, and finally to a nineteenth-century underground vault. There, in the pitch-black darkness, Alex comes face-to-face with the killer who values money more than life.

Featuring a cast of elite, erudite, and downright eccentric characters, and a complex trail of clues that will have you guessing until the final pages, Lethal Legacy is Linda Fairstein’s most beguiling thriller yet.

Reader's Guide

Read an Excerpt

In this video, Linda Fairstein takes us on a tour of the New York Public Library, focusing on the rooms where major scenes in her novel are set. Included are glimpses of the rooms where the conservators work on repairing and preserving old books and manuscripts with closeups of the instruments they use daily that stimulated the imagination of this murder mystery writer.



Oh, I am so drooling right now. I want to climb inside the screen and walk those marble floors. The New York Public Library is one of the places on my short list of places to see while I can still see.

www.lindafairstein.com


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Even if I wasn't eager to read this story I would need to pick it up next in spite of all the novels I brought with me to my Mom's and the novels and NF I checked out on my sister's library card just in order to justify having put my husband through the hassle of shipping it to me after he had to use his contacts inside UPS (he works on the shipping dock of a major Southern Oregon corporation) to have the package delivered to him at his folk's house. A package addressed to me with my pen name and to his folk's PO Box, which UPS and informed his folks they were holding at their Medford hub for me to pick up in person with three pieces of ID.

Which would have been hard to do even if I had been in town as I don't have any official picture ID (being legally blind I don't drive and nor am I highly motivated to wait in line at the DMZ for six hours to voluntarily say cheese for a camera. bleh.) and the only other remotely IDish things I have are my library card and my voter's registration card. And none of them use my pen name except in the sense that my pen name is my first and middle name--Joy Renee.

This totally embarrassing situation came about because I won this 'review' copy on Goodreads in late January after entering the drawing for it weeks before that along with about twenty others. I always use my pen name and PO Box online unless I have a very good reason to use my full name and physical address. I don't remember seeing anything on the Goodreads site at the time I entered all those drawings specifying that my physical address was required. I think, if I thought about it at all, that I figured that in the case of a win someone would contact me via email requesting the necessary info.

Antoher thing I was assuming when I entered all those drawings was that I would be safely back at home in Phoenix by the time the contests closed. Ha. I'm still here in Longview, Washington helping out in the care of my Mom as she recoveres from the broken hip and the minor stroke brought on by the hip surgery she incurred in late November. And it looks like I'll be here through March. I'm nurturing some hope that I can be home for Easter though I haven't even checked to see which week that falls on this year.

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Fooling Around

Super Text Twist
Make as many words as you can with the letters you're given and still beat the clock.

Or it could be said I'm exercising my vocabulary.

SpongeBob Collapse
Use jellyfish, stars and colored bubbles to match squares before they pile to the top.

My eye/hand coordination.

Super Collapse Puzzle Gallery 2
Remove all the blocks from the screen in the fewest possible moves.

My problem solving skills.

OK so, that's all a bit of a stretch.

And I suppose that I can't post about three games I've recently spent time with while claiming that I'm too busy to do a 'real' post today.

No. Didn't think so.

Would you believe that before Sunday night I had not been to a single game site since I got here before New Year's? Before Sunday night I had played an occassional game of Spider or Free Cell. So, in spite of it still being hectic here and feeling chaotic and crazy more than half of every day, there must have been a sea change that I hadn't quite noticed until now. There is a glimmer of light in the distance. I think maybe I can invest some hope into the idea of being home by Easter.

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12 Flashes of Joy

Still working feverishly at the photo scanning project. The last couple of days I've been going through the box devoted to pictures of me. When I came across the piles of school photos from kindergarten through highschool--of all sizes from half-wallet to 5x7--I got the idea of trying to fit the entire 13 years on a single sheet for a single scan. I'd already scanned them all one or two at a time using the larger versions so I didn't really need to scan them in again but I liked this idea and I liked it even better once I had laid them on the black cardboard. I used a white correction pen to write the grade numbers. Grade 8 is missing for some reason. Entirely not just in the right size. Total mystery as I have no memory of having missed a photo day in Jr. High. And the next size up for grade 9 was double wallet size and wouldn't have fit. Which is just as well. I hated--HATED--those glasses. Notice how they did not appear in the next two--I wore them in my pocket whenever I could get away with it. After they had gotten broke from sitting on my coat pocket one too many times, Mom finally realized that getting the sturdier frames wasn't paying off in the way she had planned and I finally was allowed to order a pair of the granny frames all the rage at that time.

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Sunday Serenity #116

Reading aloud to kids was one of my favorite pass times as a kid and still though I haven't done it for quite a while. There haven't been small children in my life for nearly a decade now. Reading aloud to small children is a sure path to peace and joy for me.

This picture must have been taken in the spring or summer of the year I was nine. The toddlers are my sister and my cousin. My sister is wearing a cast on her right wrist. She broke it while straining against the strong grip of Mom's hand as she tried to bend down to pick some nasty thing up off the ground outside a gas station where our car was being worked on. Mom felt terrible once she realized what had happened but that wasn't for hours and hours. Not until after my sister woke from her afternoon nap still fussing and favoring her forearm.

The dress I'm wearing is one Mom made. The clothe was white with black steaks on it and the piping on the cuffs and collar was red. One of Mom's maternity tops, which she also made, was made of the same material and similar pattern. I'm thinking I probably didn't wear that dress too many times after this picture was taken. I'd already been wearing it for well over two years.

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Multnomah Falls, Oregon

Four Pictures of Multnomah Falls, Oregon taken by my Dad.

I spent over six hours working on the picture scanning project today. I'm posting these pics of Multnomah Falls tonight as they go with the theme of last night's post about scanning my family's five decades worth of road trip photos to serve as inspiration and reference for the settings of my fiction. Before I got the idea of doing that I was passing over the pics that didn't have family members posing in them.

Forgive me for not cropping these four shots and tweaking their color, contrast etc. My eyes are fried and my mind swirls with images and memories. Like the one I'm preparing to post for tomorrow's Sunday Serenity as soon as I click publish on this one.

For more info about the falls, click the link in the photo caption.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: Setting/Landscape

Buried A-Frame at Kid Valley, Washington. Mid 1980s

Big Foot Statue at Kid Valley, Washington. Mid 1980s

While working on the family photo scanning project this week, it occurred to me that many of the landscape photos taken on the road trips over the decades since the mid 50s, which I'd been mostly passing over until now, could be useful for my FOS (Fruits of the Spirit) story world as inspiration and reference. Much the same way the dozens of pictures I took of our trailer park before and during NaNoWriMo last November helped me with the setting issues for my NaNo novel, Mobile Hopes. So I've started scanning them too. And thus, I don't have to write this past week off as a total bust for my fiction projects.

Many of the photos I'm finding have no notations on them of year or place. When I found the two I've posted above, I did not recognize them as anywhere I'd ever been. I noted that my Mom (on the left between Big Foot's feet) was not carrying her white cane. Which meant the time frame was delimited by after I left home in 1978 and before she began using a cane in the mid 80s (mental note: ask Mom when, precisely that was) and if the Big Foot picture and the Buried A-Frame picture were taken on the same road trip it must have been, at minimum, a year or two after Mt. St. Helens eruption in May 1980. I wasn't sure where either tourist attraction was either. I had a faint memory of hearing about that buried A-Frame in association with the St. Helens erruption.

So I Googled, 'Buried A-Frame'. Was going to Goodle 'Big Foot statue' next but ended up finding this article containing reference to both. They are both part of The Survivor's Gift Shop in Kid Valley, Washington. The article mentions that the first statue they put up in the mid 80's was made of combustible material and was destroyed in the mid 90s. Their current one is taller and made of cement. So I guess that means my folks made that trip with my Dad's brother and his wife shortly after the first Big Foot statue was errected. Something about discovering that the Big Foot statue in the picture I found no longer existed tickled my fancy, made it harder to tear my gaze off it or my mind away once I was forced to move on to more pressing tasks. I recognize that feeling as the taking root of imagination. When ever I get that 'haunted' feeling it means I'm onto something.

So I definitely don't have to call this week a bust for my fiction projects.

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A Blooming February

The crocus are blooming in my Mom's yard. The first of them poked their heads out nearly a week ago. This morning we received a dusting of snow and I wish I could have got pictures of the flowers framed by snow but by the time I woke it had all melted.

The leaves of another flower are up too. Either tulips or daffodils I presume. I'm not good at recognizing plants by their leaves. I got pictures of the mystery leaves and of some yellow crocus too but I'm too rushed to prepare more pictures for posting as I'm pushing to finish Toni Morrison's latest novel, a mercy, which I have checked out on my sister's library card. It is due tomorrow and is a high demand book that won't renew and carries a dollar a day overdue fine.

How I wish I could write like Toni Morrison. Sigh.

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Who Mugged My Head?

more animals

I'm having one of those days when even intravenous caffeine couldn't have lifted my brain out of the mud. Every thought seemed to come free with a little slurpy 'plop' sensation like the one your feet make when you walk in the sand on the edge of the surf. I was wakened from a bizarre dream after more than an eight hour sleep and the disorientation stayed with me for more than the next eight hours with the images and emotions of the dream impinging on the waking world that took on the contours of a dreamworld. My fingers fumbled everything they touched and my tongue fumbled every word it formed.

Such days follow sleeps longer than six or seven hours often enough that memories of them instill a stubborn reisistance to surrendering to sleep once I get my brain awake again. That usually takes more than twelve hours which is still more than an hour off and so here I sit minutes after my sister and her son went downstairs to bed, listening to the quiet snores of my Mom, looking around my workstation at laptop, books, notebooks, todo lists and thinking of the hours of silence and solitude stretching ahead--those hours I crave with a glutuous greed--and find myself more inclined to join in a duet with my Mom than to open a file on my computer or a book. Even though I know that if I choose more sleep now, it'll be 24 hours before this opportunity for more than five minutes of uninterrupted thought comes round again.

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Book Giveaway: Sway

I've been authorized to give away up to five copies. Be sure to read the rules below carefully as only valid entries will be included in the drawing.

Sway
by Zachary Lazar

Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary new novel, SWAY--the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers.

Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family."

With great artistry, Lazar weaves scenes from these real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human, giving demons reality, and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life.


"One hypnotic tone poem.... It is not the now-historic acts of violence that make Sway so riveting, but its vivid character portraits and decadent, muzzy atmosphere, all rendered with the heightened sensory awareness associated with drugs and paranoia.

The near miniaturist precision with which he describes Keith Richards's attempts to master his guitar, Brian Jones's acid trips and Anger's obsessive desire for Beausoleil bring this large-scale tableau into stunning relief." --Liz Brown, Time Out New York

Reading Group Guide available

Rules:

• Leave a comment in this post expressing your interest in entering the drawing.
• Provide an @ by which I can contact you in case of a win. Either in your comment or in an email to me at joystory AT gmail DOT com If you email your @ be sure to connect it to your entry. If I do not receive an @ your entry will be disqualified.
• If, in the case of a win, you would like a link to your blog in the winners announcement post, provide your URL in your comment or via email. This is not a requirement for entering nor do you have to have a blog yourself in order to enter.
• If you blog about this giveaway, send me a link to the post and your name will be entered a second time.
• Deadline for entering is NOON PST Saturday March 14, 2008. I will select the winners with a random number generator using www.random.org
• Winners must provide a US or Canadian mailing address. No PO Boxes.

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Frozen Assets

Oh. Did you think this was about cold, hard cash?

Sorry to disappoint you. But this is about a cook book and the adventures of two kitchen-challenged sisters.

The cookbook?

Frozen Assets: Cook for a Day, Eat for a Month
by Deborah Taylor-Hough
(c) 1998
Published by Champion Press Ltd
209 p.

I took ten photos of the front of the book but none of them turned out--too much glare from the flash. So I resorted to using the scanner I've been using for the family photo scan project. Took a scan of the back too as I'm short on time for explaining this tonight. My brother's family are coming up from Portland to take us all out to brunch. We are to leave about the time my alarm usually goes off.

And it's been a long day. So this is primarily a photo essay.

For more detail about the book and the concept you can explore Deborah's web site.


The idea is to stock up their freezer with meals that need only to be thawed and heated so the first month or two after I go back to Phoenix OR will be easier on them. If Mom's recovery continues apace I'll probably be back home by the end of March.

My sister did a massive grocery shop over the weekend. We are going to do what Deborah calls 'mini-sessions' instead of making all of the recipes in a single day we are going to do a separate session for each of: pork, tuna, chicken, beef & vegetarian.

Today was the pork session. We made up five recipes each of which was big enough for two meals for the three of them. Though one was frozen down as one by accident--the Sweet Sour Pork--so we'll probably go ahead and use it while I'm still here. Yay.


Here's my sister's workstation when things were in full swing. She was the vegetable preparer. Also the meat preparer. And also the one who put pieces of the separate meals together and prepared them for the freezer.

See the crock pot? Had nothing to do with the project. That was tonight's dinner--a pork roast. My sister was especially proud of thinking of putting the meal for today in the crock pot before we got started on the big project.

I just had to take a close-up of that platter. Isn't it pretty?


This was my workstation for most of the time. I was the stirrer. My first task was to prepare two boxed rice dishes that were later combined with the pork in some fashion.

This was the cubed-pork for the Sweet Sour Pork waiting for the skillet to heat. I stirred it until it was browned and heated through and then emptied it onto a plate so my sister could dump the vegetables and sauce ingredients into the skillet for me to stir until the sauce thickened.



Up close picture of the Sweet Sour Pork sauce just before we took it off the heat. I'm not one bit sorry my sister goofed and put the whole thing in a single freezer bag. It was all I could do not to drool in it while I stirred.

This was another of my roles. Clean up. Or at least loading the dishwasher. I didn't take this picture today though. I took it a few days after I banged my shin into its lowered door on New Year's Eve. Kept meaning to post it with one of the posts about that incident or the resulting ER visit six days later but never seemed to think about it. It's hard to think about updating posts when it is so hard just to get each day's post up.

I wore my shin pads all day. Kept meaning to get a picture of them but it was never a good time. They are actually my sister's gardening knee pads. They attach with a velcro strap and I wear them just above my ankles instead of on my knees. It's definitely not a fashion statement.

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Sunday Serenity #115

Remembering the joys of care-free play.

I'm about five or six here and holding my favorite baby doll, Roger, sitting on our swing-set teeter-totter. The building in the background is the Mark Morris High School which I would attend about ten years after this picture was taken.

I so loved that doll. It was more than a doll. He was my baby. Many years before this picture was taken Roger wore a dress (and a girl's name) and was my Mom's prized possession. When Mom presented the doll to me, I named him Roger after the ten-month old cousin I'd just met, so Mom made him red coureroy overalls and a red plaid flannel shirt.

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Family Photo Scanning Project

Screenshot of the folder full of scanned pictures.

The last time I came to visit my Mom, in December 2007, I began the project of scanning the family photos into my laptop which was to be the first step in creating a digital album that could be distributed among the family.

I didn't get far on the project then and had planned to come back in February or March to recommence with it. But that didn't happen. So I was planning to work on it on the pre-Xmas visit I had been planning before Mom broke her hip just before Thanksgiving.

The Family Photo Scanning Project has been on my mind ever since I got here just after Christmas but there has been too many impediments to getting started on it. Other than the exigencies of my mother's care, the running of the household and my the fallout of my run-in with the dishwasher, the biggest impediment was that the boxes of pictures had been stowed in a closet and a mattress was setting on its side in front of it. Then the table in the office I had used last time was no longer in there so there was nowhere for me to set up my laptop close enough to the scanner/printer or work with the pictures to sort and prepare them for scanning. Besides which, working in the office in the day time would interfere with my nephew's school work with my sister's sleep at night as she sleeps under the creaky floor.

It's been a couple weeks since I posted about setting up that printer in my Mom's room where my workstation has been since my second day here. But that mattress still blocked that closet in the office until today.

There is one last impediment but we have a plan to rectify it. That is the bright light from the window in here on sunny days between 9AM and 2PM that makes it hard for me to see anything but the window. The very hours when my Mom is not sleeping and my services are not needed elsewhere. The window is right above the printer and right behind my laptop's screen. We have attempted to block the light with various items that have only done a partial job of it. But my sister is going to put a black sheet over the entire window.

Scanning the pictures into the computer is just the first step. As shown below, I position as many pictures as will fit onto a cardboard that mostly fills the scanner bed. Later I have to prepare individual pictures by cropping, rotating, resizing, etc. Then naming and saving by who, when, where etc. But those things can be done after I return to Phoenix, OR. The focus while I'm here is to scan them in as fast as I can.

There is nearly a century between the earliest and latest photos on this board. In the top right corner is my Dad with his Granddaughter about six weeks before his death in 2005. The bottom left is his mother before her marriage and the bottom left is both of his parents early in their marriage before there were children. So, well over a decade before he was born.

I have no clue who the three ladies in vintage hats are above. The baby on the pony is my Dad. And the line of stair-step boys is my Dad (youngest) and his brothers. The same boys, all grown with grown kids of their own are pictured on the bottom left of the board below. Top left is the whole family. Top right is Dad and his parents just before he joined the Navy in 1950 something. Bottom right is Dad's Dad's Mom holding me.

Above are four picture of me and my brother and sister spread over most of a decade. Below you see four pictures of me age 12, 14, 16 and nearly 17.

All of these pictures were scanned in December 07. I'm eager to recommence the project.

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Friday Forays In Fiction: Reading & Research

Last Thursday and again this Tuesday, I got to visit the Longview library and among the materials I checked out were things to support several of my fiction WIP. For Mobile Hopes, my NaNo novel this past November, I checked out three short story collections. Remember, Mobile Hopes was envisioned as a novel woven of dozens of short stories, each featuring a different character living in the same mobile home park. It is also an exercise in learning the art of the short story so reading short stories is part of the process.

For Spring Fever, my NaNo novel from 2007, I checked out several books on time, seasons, calendars.

For my story (Novella?) Home Is Where the Horror Is, aka Crystal's story, I checked out several books about fundamentalism and cults. Which is also central to my FOS story world to which both Crystal and Faye et al from Making Rag Doll Babies and Million Dolar Maybes belong.

Other than the time I spent searching them out on the shelves and packing them home (to Mom's) and rearranging my writing station here to make room for them all, I haven't spent much time with them other than gazing at them and thinking about what I hope to do with them.

It seems that every time I find a free moment or two to sit with a book, my eyes and/or mind just blur out on me. I know this is not going to get better unless I first find time to catch up on some sleep. I'm hoping to address that issue tonight. It means giving up the majority of my late night session--the only time free of noise, chaos and risk of interruption. But the sleep deprivation has accumulated to the point I am getting little return on investment for the use I've been putting those hours for over a week now.

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Incremental Improvements

Oh, did you think this was going to be a continuation of yesterday's round-up of Mom's post-surgery progress?

Nah. I need to throw up a quick post tonight. Not much thought is going into this. Not much story. It could even look a bit like bragging. Maybe it is.

The theme of improvement is on my mind after preparing yesterday's post. And that led me to think of the improvements I've made in my typing speed and accuracy since the last time I posted my results with this site's fun test sometime last spring or summer. I've been practicing.

When I first discovered the site, I was appalled at how badly my skills had deteriorated. I was getting wpm speeds in the 5os with three to six incorrect. I wouldn't even use the embed code the site provides for bragging I was so chagrined. Not until I reached the high 60s error free. I'm too time pressed. (or lazy; unmotivated) to hunt down that post and link it here.

Well I have been working toward 80 wpm error free. I'm not there yet but I'm closing in and this week got a score I don't mind sharing:

308 points, so you achieved position 183894 of 2338262 on the ranking list


You type 390 characters per minute
You have 78 correct words and
you have 0 wrong words

78 words

Speed test

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Small Steps

All pictures in this post were taken in mid January. This one and the one at the end, on the occasion of Mom's first outdoor stroll after my arrival here just before New Year's Day. It had only been the weather keeping her indoors though. This was the first day there hadn't been snow, ice, rain, or frost on the slope of the driveway. Walks like this are becoming more frequent as the weather permits and do not fatigue her nearly as much nor cause as much pain.

Today Mom's evaluation therapist came. He thinks she is ready to start practicing with a cane--only with an escort at her back or elbow though. Having her free of the walker and steady on her feet is one of the bare minimum requirements that must be met before I can consider going back to Phoenix, leaving my sister in charge alone. Not that she isn't in charge now. Though she is my baby sister by seven years, she is the one running this household right now. I am at her service.

The therapist also remarked upon the improvement in Mom's speech. She was answering his questions with many fewer stumbles over lost words and needed very little help from my sister to complete or clarify her responses.

Her energy and vitality are improving daily too. She has come a long way since the fall that broke her left hip and the mild stroke that followed the surgery and left her with much of her noun vocabulary locked away from access. We're coming up on three months this week.

The cutting board between the stove and oven where I mixed the salmon loaf

Last Friday she helped me prepare dinner while my sister and her son attended a home schooler function. She washed and trimmed and wrapped four potatoes in foil while I mixed the salmon loaf off the recipe she had written down from memory for my sister the first week I was here. She gave me more than a bit of a scare when she opened the oven door beside my right elbow--the pre-heated to 400 degrees oven. I had my hands in the goopy salmon and egg mixture. She had been working at the sink behind me. I did not expect her to try to put the potatoes in the oven!! She not only tried, she succeded. She had turned around inside her walker and taken a step and a half away from it to reach the oven door handle. Then while I watched and feebly protested, she made a half turn back to lift the baking sheet holding the four wrapped potatoes and lay it on the open oven door--about our elbow level--and then took another step and a half before lifting the baking sheet up and sliding it onto the rack. All of this with no oven mitt!

The sink where Mom prepared the potatoes for the oven

I didn't know whether to see this as evidence of the poor judgment that may be related to the stroke and thus proof that she was far from ready to be left unattended; or as evidence that most of her skills were intact and she was raring to get back into action. I've mentioned before that she was a home ec teacher before she met my Dad and right through the spring she learned I was on my way. The kitchen, the garden, the sewing machine and a variety of arts and crafts were her bailiwick. My sister and I together are struggling to keep three square meals on her lap each day.

And for years, Mom has enjoyed a nearly daily walk in spite of her visual impairment. I think the only thing keeping her from it now is the weather. There have been a few more occasions since that one in January. But only a few.

So my sister and I have much to feel encouraged about. The small steps Mom has taken are adding up to huge strides towards a time Mom will be ruling at least one of her bailiwicks again--the kitchen. If she continues improving at this pace, my services could become less crucial by the time the daffodils are standing tall.

Hope that I might be home with Ed and Merlin before Easter is a bittersweet bloom in my heart for I would just be exchanging one homesickness for another.

My sister escorting Mom on that mid January stroll.

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Loitering at the Library

Standing on the mezzanine where the fiction is, overlooking the second-floor reading room.

I got another chance to go hang out for couple hours at the Library. I came very close to tapping out my sister's library card, adding nineteen items to the nineteen already on it. Thought that latter might have included the three DVD I returned. Last week I was just browsing and gazing. This time I went looking for specific things related to WIP, including research related to my stories and unfinished book reviews.

I am understandably eager to spend some of this precious late evening quiet time looking at my haul. So I'm posting some of the pictures I took last Thursday with brief comments. Remember this is the library of my childhood and has not been my library for over nine years. But of course in a sense it will always be my library. I love this library. Throughout my childhood and well into my twenties this library was a landscape in my dreams. As a young child I fantasized of living here.

Here I was standing under the mezzanine and aiming towards the reading room though I caught the edge of the media shelves--CD, DVD, audio books etc. The section of shelve directly to my right are the last of the 900s in the Non-fiction

Here I just turned a few degrees right and aimed down the center aisle. That is the same 900s shelf to the left. The 100s begin behind me and to the right. The elevator is to my left.

The children's picture book area on the first floor. There are at least two more of those carpet-lined bathtubs scattered about the J area. There is a separate room for the YA or 11 years and up which I didn't go into.

This is the story hour area. The far wall is part of the chapter book fiction for 2nd to 5th graders. There is a separate room for their NF and Reference books which I didn't take pictures of because there were kids studying in there.

The story hour area from the other side, showing the carpeted 'bleachers'. This was put in around the time I entered Jr High and thus graduated to the upstairs collection. Back then you had to be 13 to check out items upstairs without a note from your parent. Back then the YA shelves were just beginning to be kept separate and were a fairly small section of shelves at the end of the upstairs reading room. Now they have a room of their own.

This is the other end of the chapter book fiction. The backside of the story hour amphetheater is ten feet or so to my right and the picture book area directly behind me.

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Drumming Dreams

Blue Man Group at the Grammys

The other day I was trying to describe The Blue Man Group and their unique music-making to my sister. I didn't have the words and found my own memories confused anyway. So that night, after she had gone to bed, I went to YouTube to look for videos to refresh my memory. And I got lost there for hours. And hours.

My memory had included their blue faces, their mime act, and intricate instruments made out of PVC pipes some of which stood solid on the stage and others wrapped around their bodies. I remembered all of that but I had forgotten that they were drummers!

No wonder I remembered them fondly though. Drumming is something that has always called to me.

I collected dozens of links to the videos I encountered. After the first half-dozen I realized that I had more than plenty for a demonstration for my sister--more than she would be willing to sit still for--but I couldn't stop.

Later the drumming, the pipes, the paint hijacked my dreams.

I was looking for a topic for tonight's post and remembered that night of Blue Man Group Dreaming. I thought I could put together a quick post from memory. Maybe I could have but I couldn't resist watching one first. And one led to another. And another. And next thing I knew three hours were gone.

I had also hoped to choose just one video for this post. Ha.

During that three hours, I realized that I could chock all these hours and the dozens of links up to research for the Maia character in my Spring Fever WIP--my NaNo novel from 2007. I don't know if I would necessarily make any mention of the Blue Man Group in the story. It is enough that watching these videos gives me a better sense of what goes into stage producing a sensational act. That is one of Maia's passions.

After hours of watching these guys, I have an incredible itch to pick up a pair of drumsticks and start drumming on every surface in sight.

Blue Man Group on Jay Leno

Blue Man Group wearing their PVC instruments on stage with Tiesto.

Blue Man Group demonstrating the workings of the eye.

Blue Man Group clowning

You might be most familiar with Blue Man Group from the Intel commercials:

The Keys
The Treadmill
The Paint

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Sunday Serenity #114

You have to see and hear this to believe it. The music is soothing and intriguing. The music making machine making the music is like something out of a Dr Seuss story. Just knowing such things exist in this world gives me joy.

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Winner's Circle

moar funny pictures

Update: Winners are now posted below.

Thanks to all the entrants to my three book giveaways! Due to the number and current circumstances that limit my computer activities I may not get all the winners announced and notified today. But this is the post where you will find the fifteen winners listed. Five for each of:


Sundays at Tiffany's

Sue A.
techyone
bridget
photoquest
Stephanie

The Italian Lover

Gwendolyn B.
tetewa
The Giveaway Diva
Tarasview
techyone

The Terror

infiniteshelf
Jodi
Lady Roxi
Wendy
waitmantwillie


I will do my best to get the notification emails sent and the winners posted here by the wee hours of Monday morning.

Meanwhile enjoy some more Valentine fun from LOL cats. Did you know you can send them as ecards now?



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moar funny pictures


moar funny pictures


moar funny pictures

BTW I captioned all the LOLs you see here. If you like any of them enough to go vote for it, that would be cool. Just click on the picture here and when on its page click on one of the cheeseburgers. The option to send it as an ecard is right below the cheeseburger rating. The options to send in email, embed in blog, digg it, leave a comment and/or recaption it yourself are below the picture on each page.

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